- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.
I’m really sad about the loss of HyperCard (and HyperCard like things.) I worked in a musical instrument store in the early 90s and my boss had a Mac SE (maybe an SE/30 like in TFA?) tricked out with an entire custom set of HyperCard stacks designed to run his business, everything from inventory to accounting to instrument rental. Every now and then we’d need something and one of us would code up a new feature. My wife is starting a business today and I’m dreaming of having something as great as HyperCard to help her script up what she needs, but nothing commercial seems nearly as cool.
Thanks for that info! I'm keen to get stuck into HyperCard stacks running on their native environment (not in an emulator) - so many people love HyperCard and miss it, so I look forward to seeing what the fuss is.
It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee.
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
What really disheartens me with modern cars is that electric cars are much simpler than than cars powered by combustion engines, which could be a huge boon to the fix-it-yourself crowd, but car manufacturers now lock customers out of their cars, so electric cars don't have the opportunity to become hobbyist friendly.
There are small electric-car companies that let customers do what they want, like Edison Motors, but they make industrial-sized work vehicles. It would be nice if a similar small company started selling consumer cars, but the automotive industry is heavily plagued by bikeshedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality) to the point that large trucks and busses are allowed to do their thing, while subcompact vehicles have been effectively regulated out of existence.
In theory they can be mechanically, in practice high ADAS standards and functionality like regenerative breaking make it feel like a pretty high risk proposal to allow an end user in.
Contrary to popular belief, EVs really aren't that much easier to repair, that's just a logical expectation from people without service experience based on the idea of less moving parts, but that omits that fact that electronics die too and EVs have more of them and under more strenuous loads.
Most of the faults on EVs come from dead electronics like a fried MOSFET or PCB trace, and coolant leaks inside the motor due to gasket failures derived from race-to-the-bottom cost cutting designs to save money, which your average user won't be able to repair themselves unless maybe we're talking about completely swapping out the entire ECU/motor/battery/assembly with a brand new one instead of repairing it, parts which haven't been designed for easy repairability. And that's excluding DRM issues and the fact that those parts aren't sold to consumers and even if they would, stuff like ADAS sensors, motors and batteries still require calibration with dedicated equipment during installation and can't be plug&play like a laptop battery swap.
Check out EV clinic(no affiliation) for horror stories on EVs and hybrids failures. Due to poor design, a lot of EVs (maybe excluding Teslas) are reliability ticking timebombs whose failure is a matter of WHEN not IF.
> It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are.
Right.[1]
I think of those guys at the Computer Museum who took years to repair an IBM 1401. They even had the assistance of some of the designers and retired IBM field engineers.
The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines.
Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
Old cars are even like that in performance. My son and I just bought a 1979 Ford Thunderbird which has a 5ℓ V8 engine but doesn't accelerate as well as a modern compact with a 1.5ℓ Inline 4.
It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.
My family had a '79 Thunderbird that was our main driver from 91-97. I haven't seen any of them on the road in over a decade. I have several memories of that car.
- The water pump going out, as we drove up a mountain, and rolling back down into the drive way of a converted apple barn. Where we found a nice cleaning lady who took my dad the 20 miles into town to get a new water pump, which he replaced in that driveway and got us back on the road.
- The rear diff throwing a bearing well after midnight in the middle of nowhere west Texas. The car limped a few miles down the road to a surprisingly still open gas station. My uncle, a mechanic, happened to have the necessary parts to fix it on him. So when he picked my dad up an hour later, they went ahead and spent the rest of the overnight hours replacing it in the parking lot of that middle of nowhere gas station.
- Spending several days at various salvage yards looking for rear tail lights. They are just the right height to be taken out by shopping carts. Unfortunately the 79 is the only year that didn't have a connecting strip that goes between the left and right hand sides. In the 90's they were very hard to find, I can't imagine they are any easier today. Seriously, buy an extra set even if you don't need them.
If you ever want a to move to a modern V8, Ford's panther platform from '02-'11 are just as big, roomy, and easy to work on as that Thunderbird. Plus you'll get modern conveniences like anti-lock breaks, air-bags, and good part availability.
These old cars can be a lot of fun but even the fast ones weren't that fast when taken against a modern family car... take a 68 Mustang, an iconic car as featured in Bullitt, with a 0-60 of 5.4 seconds and compare it to a 2012 Toyota Camry doing the same in 5.8 seconds.
Here's the thing. A 68 Mustang had no almost emissions controls. A 78 Thunderbird was almost the exact same stuff, except it was choked to shit. A modern computer-controlled Camry is not only way better performing, it also orders of magnitude cleaner.
IMO the ICE has achieved its final form, so now the future has to be something else (electric).
“ I do a lot of work on my own vehicles. I think a lot of the responses are from people who do not.
Paying for vehicle repair labor is basically a tax. They're making it harder and harder to fix your own car. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to find headlight assemblies that didn't need to be coded to work correctly. Headlights.
All the outrage about right-to-repair around here, and nobody realizes the frog is almost boiled around repairing cars.”
I’d love to have a project car that I could work on, particularly something simple like a classic Volkswagen Beetle or maybe something more complex but still manageable like a 1980s BMW, but one significant challenge I have (and many other would-be car hobbyists) is being able to afford housing where I’m not subject to lease/HOA restrictions or even local ordinances prohibiting at-home repairs. These restrictions are understandable, especially when considering liability, insurance, and dangers such as the improper storage and disposal of chemicals such as oil. However, this means there isn’t much of a workaround for paying for labor at a mechanic, which has become costly.
During my adult life thus far I’ve only lived in apartments, and every apartment that I’ve rented has a lease clause prohibiting car maintenance and repairs except for very simple tasks such as replacing windshield wipers. Thus, I drive newer cars that don’t require many repairs, and I pay a mechanic whenever I need to perform maintenance or repairs, which costs a lot of money, especially in the Bay Area (the mechanic needs to pay for two places: the rent/mortgage for the shop and also for the mechanic’s residence). Being able to afford a house with a garage and no HOA will require me to either become rich or move out of the Bay Area.
Paying for labor is indeed a heavy tax, but unfortunately thanks to lease/HOA restrictions and sometimes local ordinances, this tax is unavoidable, short of giving up driving.
I've been slowing working on a hobby project to 3D print a lookalike Sony PVM with a computer inside. There is a joy in knowing exactly how something works, and to be able to fix it intuitively.
Have 2 Apple ][e, Lisa, Apple NeXT Cube, Fat Mac 512K, Mac IIci, Mac LC and an Apple Xserve, as part of my Apple collection. Along with Sinclair ZX81 and an Atari 800. Many decades of collecting and maintaining them. Unfortunately kids are not interested in inheriting them after I'm gone, even as I have shared with the some of the great origin stories behind some of these machines. They don't see the value. Their logic is that they can always spin up an emulator and try the software, instead of keeping these old dinosaurs around.
Take an SE/30, add some mass storage (something above 20MB), plug in a postscript printer, add ClarisWorks, maybe Filemaker, and you have something that, even today, would do 80%+ of what human beings use computers for.
Outside of the internet.
Get a network adapter (which pretty sure exists for the SE/30), and, like, Eudora(?), and you MIGHT even get email. Struggle there is everyone (rightly) does email over TLS, so there’s that.
BUT, add a raspberry pi as an email gateway, telnet to it for some Lynx love, and, boy, that’s a lot of computer utility.
Glaring gaps are anything graphic intensive, notably photos, and graphical internet.
Betting there’s some nice games that run on the SE.
I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
This resonates so hard with me! Except in my case it’s the Apple ][.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
I wonder if my kids will feel the same about their iPad 8 or whatever version this is... My guess is not.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
Oh hell yeah, that's top of my list once I crack open the case (waiting for a long T15 driver to arrive!) and poke around inside. I've got a lot of friends who have done it before, so I'll give them the board and and some money and some chocolate/beer (depending on the friend!) and ask for help with recapping the logic board.
I know what he means. I don’t have the room (or time) to restore and keep an old Mac, but I am 3D printing little replicas (and tweaking the models out there) to build something to toy with: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/06/22/1830
Mine currently runs System 7 and After Dark 24/7 (while acting as a Tailscale exit node) on my shelf, and I’m currently (slowly) designing a facsimile mouse for it. I love tinkering with the thing even if the screen size is atrociously small for practical use because _everything just works without any bullshit_,
Then again I have a long history of having something like this around (I used to have the same Pi setup as a Plan 9 terminal solely for SSHing into my homelab without distractions), but there is something about that particular era of computing that makes me not just nostalgic but genuinely interested in re-living it to a degree.
I don’t really miss the Sinclair or Ataris I had before, nor any of the other 8/16 bit computers I used—-not even the games—-but there is something about the early Macs (up until the IIfx) that is indelibly burned into my brain.
We had rudimentary Internet, Mail, NNTP, all the barebone stuff, and being on the cusp of the browser era was very fun (I do miss my NeXT too, but hardly as much in comparison).
There is certainly a nostalgia that I feel about tech from when I was 8 until 15 years old. This corresponded with Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kits, the Mattel Big Trak programmable vehicle, Mattel handheld electronic games, the Vectrex gaming system, the ZX-81 and the Commodore Amiga 500 computer. And I will throw in old Edmund Scientific catalogs for good measure. I was pre-Nintendo and Sega and certainly pre-Playstation and Xbox by a generation
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Surprisingly, a lot of the Internet is still accessible to these old dinosaurs, through the efforts of retro enthusiasts. A search engine like FrogFind reformats results for the earliest browsers like Netscape Navigator, and kind of "text modes" the pages. There's even virtual plugfests like GlobalTalk that links together retro enthusiasts' printers over the Internet.
Many countries in Europe are now restricting access to cities to exclude even what would be considered relatively new vehicles. For example, Amsterdam's plan includes a transition to a zero-emission city center by 2030, and is already at Euro 4 emissions, affecting many vehicles from the 2000s. Germany's cities are also well ahead on emissions restrictions, as is Paris. No classic for you! I think only one of my cars would be allowed to operate in much of the Randstad today, but thankfully I don't live or work there anymore.
Meanwhile PDP-8 systems like mine are selling for in excess of €6k these days, and someone recently paid €1750 for a NeXTstation Turbo Color like mine, to say nothing of the other 20+ 60s, 70s, and 80s systems in my collection. I regularly remind my wife: if I drop dead unexpectedly, SELL that stuff, don't junk it or give it away.
A random 1950s-1970s car in serviceable driving condition can be had for a few grand around here, but Millennials having kids, nostalgia, and money all at the same time, not to mention COVID madness, has shot old computer prices through the roof. I expect that market will crater when they put us in the ground, much as the vintage car market is coming down a bit as we lose Boomers without gaining as many younger people interested in old cars. Populations moving to cities means that parking your vanity car (if classics are even allowed) in addition to your commuter would represent a significant uplift in ongoing expense, which will probably help to keep that market depressed.
Suggestions for old Mac Apps to look out for:
- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.
I’m really sad about the loss of HyperCard (and HyperCard like things.) I worked in a musical instrument store in the early 90s and my boss had a Mac SE (maybe an SE/30 like in TFA?) tricked out with an entire custom set of HyperCard stacks designed to run his business, everything from inventory to accounting to instrument rental. Every now and then we’d need something and one of us would code up a new feature. My wife is starting a business today and I’m dreaming of having something as great as HyperCard to help her script up what she needs, but nothing commercial seems nearly as cool.
Dark Castle. Aldus Pagemaker. Word 5.1. After Dark.
Thanks for that info! I'm keen to get stuck into HyperCard stacks running on their native environment (not in an emulator) - so many people love HyperCard and miss it, so I look forward to seeing what the fuss is.
Wow, I had forgotten about SteppingOut. I used that thing a lot on the smaller Macs.
It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee.
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
What really disheartens me with modern cars is that electric cars are much simpler than than cars powered by combustion engines, which could be a huge boon to the fix-it-yourself crowd, but car manufacturers now lock customers out of their cars, so electric cars don't have the opportunity to become hobbyist friendly.
There are small electric-car companies that let customers do what they want, like Edison Motors, but they make industrial-sized work vehicles. It would be nice if a similar small company started selling consumer cars, but the automotive industry is heavily plagued by bikeshedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality) to the point that large trucks and busses are allowed to do their thing, while subcompact vehicles have been effectively regulated out of existence.
In theory they can be mechanically, in practice high ADAS standards and functionality like regenerative breaking make it feel like a pretty high risk proposal to allow an end user in.
Also 800V lithium battery packs capable of delivering hundreds of amps of current.
Contrary to popular belief, EVs really aren't that much easier to repair, that's just a logical expectation from people without service experience based on the idea of less moving parts, but that omits that fact that electronics die too and EVs have more of them and under more strenuous loads.
Most of the faults on EVs come from dead electronics like a fried MOSFET or PCB trace, and coolant leaks inside the motor due to gasket failures derived from race-to-the-bottom cost cutting designs to save money, which your average user won't be able to repair themselves unless maybe we're talking about completely swapping out the entire ECU/motor/battery/assembly with a brand new one instead of repairing it, parts which haven't been designed for easy repairability. And that's excluding DRM issues and the fact that those parts aren't sold to consumers and even if they would, stuff like ADAS sensors, motors and batteries still require calibration with dedicated equipment during installation and can't be plug&play like a laptop battery swap.
Check out EV clinic(no affiliation) for horror stories on EVs and hybrids failures. Due to poor design, a lot of EVs (maybe excluding Teslas) are reliability ticking timebombs whose failure is a matter of WHEN not IF.
> It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are.
Right.[1]
I think of those guys at the Computer Museum who took years to repair an IBM 1401. They even had the assistance of some of the designers and retired IBM field engineers.
[1] https://freefallmirror.com/ff300/fv00214.gif
The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines.
Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
Old cars are even like that in performance. My son and I just bought a 1979 Ford Thunderbird which has a 5ℓ V8 engine but doesn't accelerate as well as a modern compact with a 1.5ℓ Inline 4.
It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.
My family had a '79 Thunderbird that was our main driver from 91-97. I haven't seen any of them on the road in over a decade. I have several memories of that car.
- The water pump going out, as we drove up a mountain, and rolling back down into the drive way of a converted apple barn. Where we found a nice cleaning lady who took my dad the 20 miles into town to get a new water pump, which he replaced in that driveway and got us back on the road.
- The rear diff throwing a bearing well after midnight in the middle of nowhere west Texas. The car limped a few miles down the road to a surprisingly still open gas station. My uncle, a mechanic, happened to have the necessary parts to fix it on him. So when he picked my dad up an hour later, they went ahead and spent the rest of the overnight hours replacing it in the parking lot of that middle of nowhere gas station.
- Spending several days at various salvage yards looking for rear tail lights. They are just the right height to be taken out by shopping carts. Unfortunately the 79 is the only year that didn't have a connecting strip that goes between the left and right hand sides. In the 90's they were very hard to find, I can't imagine they are any easier today. Seriously, buy an extra set even if you don't need them.
If you ever want a to move to a modern V8, Ford's panther platform from '02-'11 are just as big, roomy, and easy to work on as that Thunderbird. Plus you'll get modern conveniences like anti-lock breaks, air-bags, and good part availability.
That sounds like it needs a tune-up. Lots of performance parts available too for cars from that era.
These old cars can be a lot of fun but even the fast ones weren't that fast when taken against a modern family car... take a 68 Mustang, an iconic car as featured in Bullitt, with a 0-60 of 5.4 seconds and compare it to a 2012 Toyota Camry doing the same in 5.8 seconds.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a151426...
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15122183/toyota-camry-...
I used to drive a 62 Studebaker. People saw an old car and asked me if it was fast. Hell no, I'd answer -- but by God it can suck fuel!
Here's the thing. A 68 Mustang had no almost emissions controls. A 78 Thunderbird was almost the exact same stuff, except it was choked to shit. A modern computer-controlled Camry is not only way better performing, it also orders of magnitude cleaner.
IMO the ICE has achieved its final form, so now the future has to be something else (electric).
I'd guess it was always a malaise-era smogdog, the same engine from a decade later was much better.
I enjoy my 72 Dodge, because I know what every part in it does.
Wholeheartedly agree. I’ll leave this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422763
“ I do a lot of work on my own vehicles. I think a lot of the responses are from people who do not. Paying for vehicle repair labor is basically a tax. They're making it harder and harder to fix your own car. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to find headlight assemblies that didn't need to be coded to work correctly. Headlights. All the outrage about right-to-repair around here, and nobody realizes the frog is almost boiled around repairing cars.”
I’d love to have a project car that I could work on, particularly something simple like a classic Volkswagen Beetle or maybe something more complex but still manageable like a 1980s BMW, but one significant challenge I have (and many other would-be car hobbyists) is being able to afford housing where I’m not subject to lease/HOA restrictions or even local ordinances prohibiting at-home repairs. These restrictions are understandable, especially when considering liability, insurance, and dangers such as the improper storage and disposal of chemicals such as oil. However, this means there isn’t much of a workaround for paying for labor at a mechanic, which has become costly.
During my adult life thus far I’ve only lived in apartments, and every apartment that I’ve rented has a lease clause prohibiting car maintenance and repairs except for very simple tasks such as replacing windshield wipers. Thus, I drive newer cars that don’t require many repairs, and I pay a mechanic whenever I need to perform maintenance or repairs, which costs a lot of money, especially in the Bay Area (the mechanic needs to pay for two places: the rent/mortgage for the shop and also for the mechanic’s residence). Being able to afford a house with a garage and no HOA will require me to either become rich or move out of the Bay Area.
Paying for labor is indeed a heavy tax, but unfortunately thanks to lease/HOA restrictions and sometimes local ordinances, this tax is unavoidable, short of giving up driving.
I've been slowing working on a hobby project to 3D print a lookalike Sony PVM with a computer inside. There is a joy in knowing exactly how something works, and to be able to fix it intuitively.
Have 2 Apple ][e, Lisa, Apple NeXT Cube, Fat Mac 512K, Mac IIci, Mac LC and an Apple Xserve, as part of my Apple collection. Along with Sinclair ZX81 and an Atari 800. Many decades of collecting and maintaining them. Unfortunately kids are not interested in inheriting them after I'm gone, even as I have shared with the some of the great origin stories behind some of these machines. They don't see the value. Their logic is that they can always spin up an emulator and try the software, instead of keeping these old dinosaurs around.
Take an SE/30, add some mass storage (something above 20MB), plug in a postscript printer, add ClarisWorks, maybe Filemaker, and you have something that, even today, would do 80%+ of what human beings use computers for.
Outside of the internet.
Get a network adapter (which pretty sure exists for the SE/30), and, like, Eudora(?), and you MIGHT even get email. Struggle there is everyone (rightly) does email over TLS, so there’s that.
BUT, add a raspberry pi as an email gateway, telnet to it for some Lynx love, and, boy, that’s a lot of computer utility.
Glaring gaps are anything graphic intensive, notably photos, and graphical internet.
Betting there’s some nice games that run on the SE.
Prince of Persia is a great game to run on older Macs (not necessarily the SE).
I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
Thanks for this reminder.
MathCAD? TK!Solver?
Maple?
This resonates so hard with me! Except in my case it’s the Apple ][.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
I wonder if my kids will feel the same about their iPad 8 or whatever version this is... My guess is not.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
The se/30 is a beautiful machine, but it’s got some of the worst battery and cap issues, so clean it up quick :)
Oh hell yeah, that's top of my list once I crack open the case (waiting for a long T15 driver to arrive!) and poke around inside. I've got a lot of friends who have done it before, so I'll give them the board and and some money and some chocolate/beer (depending on the friend!) and ask for help with recapping the logic board.
Time plays tricks. I also love vintage computing equipment but somehow the keyboards and mice are less kind to my hands than my memory of them.
Perhaps my acquired hate of low profile non-buckling-spring keyboards is misplaced?
I know what he means. I don’t have the room (or time) to restore and keep an old Mac, but I am 3D printing little replicas (and tweaking the models out there) to build something to toy with: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/06/22/1830
Mine currently runs System 7 and After Dark 24/7 (while acting as a Tailscale exit node) on my shelf, and I’m currently (slowly) designing a facsimile mouse for it. I love tinkering with the thing even if the screen size is atrociously small for practical use because _everything just works without any bullshit_,
Then again I have a long history of having something like this around (I used to have the same Pi setup as a Plan 9 terminal solely for SSHing into my homelab without distractions), but there is something about that particular era of computing that makes me not just nostalgic but genuinely interested in re-living it to a degree.
I don’t really miss the Sinclair or Ataris I had before, nor any of the other 8/16 bit computers I used—-not even the games—-but there is something about the early Macs (up until the IIfx) that is indelibly burned into my brain.
We had rudimentary Internet, Mail, NNTP, all the barebone stuff, and being on the cusp of the browser era was very fun (I do miss my NeXT too, but hardly as much in comparison).
I have very fond memories of overclocking our 50 MHz Pentium to 75 MHz (after adding in a fan). Magic.
There is certainly a nostalgia that I feel about tech from when I was 8 until 15 years old. This corresponded with Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kits, the Mattel Big Trak programmable vehicle, Mattel handheld electronic games, the Vectrex gaming system, the ZX-81 and the Commodore Amiga 500 computer. And I will throw in old Edmund Scientific catalogs for good measure. I was pre-Nintendo and Sega and certainly pre-Playstation and Xbox by a generation
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
This is the electronics kit I had as a boy:
https://generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html
If you work through the base kit and the sequels, it offers a complete undergraduate course in electronics, minus the math.
nice photos!
An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Whatever rocks your boat I guess.
Surprisingly, a lot of the Internet is still accessible to these old dinosaurs, through the efforts of retro enthusiasts. A search engine like FrogFind reformats results for the earliest browsers like Netscape Navigator, and kind of "text modes" the pages. There's even virtual plugfests like GlobalTalk that links together retro enthusiasts' printers over the Internet.
Wow! Frogfind looks great, I've been thinking of writing my own proxy but it makes me happy to see someone has beat me to it.
So basically "as long as another machine does the work", which would be like towing an old car on a trailer.
Well, I disagree!
Many countries in Europe are now restricting access to cities to exclude even what would be considered relatively new vehicles. For example, Amsterdam's plan includes a transition to a zero-emission city center by 2030, and is already at Euro 4 emissions, affecting many vehicles from the 2000s. Germany's cities are also well ahead on emissions restrictions, as is Paris. No classic for you! I think only one of my cars would be allowed to operate in much of the Randstad today, but thankfully I don't live or work there anymore.
Meanwhile PDP-8 systems like mine are selling for in excess of €6k these days, and someone recently paid €1750 for a NeXTstation Turbo Color like mine, to say nothing of the other 20+ 60s, 70s, and 80s systems in my collection. I regularly remind my wife: if I drop dead unexpectedly, SELL that stuff, don't junk it or give it away.
A random 1950s-1970s car in serviceable driving condition can be had for a few grand around here, but Millennials having kids, nostalgia, and money all at the same time, not to mention COVID madness, has shot old computer prices through the roof. I expect that market will crater when they put us in the ground, much as the vintage car market is coming down a bit as we lose Boomers without gaining as many younger people interested in old cars. Populations moving to cities means that parking your vanity car (if classics are even allowed) in addition to your commuter would represent a significant uplift in ongoing expense, which will probably help to keep that market depressed.